Nanocrystal "factory" makes mass manufacturing of quantum dots feasible

Quantum dots are assemblies of colloidal semiconductor crystals which have properties colluded with light, and have found use in fields as diverse as biological sensing, imaging, LED displays and solar energy harvesting. They have great potential, they have to date been difficult to produce in bulk. Engineers at North Carolina State University claim that their new technique, which allows real-time process control to ensure quality, could solve this problem.

"We call this system the Nanocrystal (NC) Factory, and it builds on the NanoRobo microfluidic platform that we unveiled in 2017," said Milad Abolhasani, an assistant professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at NC State and corresponding author of a paper on the work in the journal Advanced Functional Materials. "Not only can we create the QDs in any color using a continuous manufacturing approach, but the NC Factory system is highly modular," Abolhasani added. "This means that, coupled with continuous process monitoring, the system allows modifications to be made as needed to eliminate the batch-to-batch variation that can be a significant problem for conventional QD manufacturing techniques. Additionally, the chemistry we have developed in this work allows the perovskite QD processing to take place at room temperature."